Author Description

Writing With Things: Anarchy and Openness on the Cusp of Drawing and Painting uses the author's drawing and paintings-- including 16 large color images-- as gateways to a sustained engagement with art-making as a contemplative, meditative, and visionary practice-- as suggested by the ways the included images occupy a set of cusps that displace dualistic distinctions between drawing and painting, foregrounds and backgrounds, abstraction and figuration, chance and intent, and image-making and writing. By close attention to making art as a durational and open-ended practice, the book explores what the evolution of a drawing makes visible and experienceable-- what it opens up-- even in its eventually "fossilized" form. Along the way, the book is in ongoing conversation with works by mystical writer/painters such as Blake, Kandinsky, and contemporary kabbalist David Chaim Smith. For a longish sample from the book, please visit iralivingston.com. (This book is part of a set of four books by Ira Livingston published by Poetics Lab in 2024. The set is also available on Amazon-- at a discount-- under the title Poetics Lab Book Set and includes a colorful slipcase that conjures up a secret message hidden in the titles.) Reviewers have described Ira Livingston's previous books as “lucid, playful, and reader-friendly,” “exhilarating and moving,” and “high-level discursive performance art full of conceptual kicks.” Livingston trained first as a visual artist and then in poetics, cultural theory and the study of complex systems. He is Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute of Art and Design in Brooklyn, New York.